4 promising open source projects for 2018

This year has been a year of massive growth in open source. While almost any developer knows frameworks such as React and projects like Docker (moby), in 2017 the number of open source projects on GitHub grew from around 35 million to over 62 million.

As open source is expected to continue to grow and standardize more development fields, here is a short preview of some of the most promising candidates to rise in 2018. Most of them were built around the growing realization that the age of components has just begun and that applications in 2018 will be built using encapsulated, composable and styled components as building blocks – which should be easily shared and used in our different applications.

1. Vue

Although already widely known and very buzzy, Vue is increasing in adoption in the community and organizations and might very well become an even competitor for frameworks such as React in 2018. It is a library for building interactive web interfaces and provides a simple, flexible API for its data-reactive components. It has a simple, minimal core with an incrementally adoptable stack that can handle apps of any scale. It’s lightweight, simplicity and community adoption position it as one of the most promising candidates for massive growth in 2018.

2. Bit

Bit is an extension for your Git repositories that enables you to share parts from their existing source-code and natively integrate them into other repos, without having to set up and maintain additional repositories/packages.

Any subset of files from your Git repo can be easily tracked and shared as a reusable component, creating a playlist-like collection of components to be used by different team members and projects. You and your team can share and discover components, collaborate, get updates and stay in sync.

3. Styled Components

With over 10k stars in just a few months (and keeps gaining popularity), this project allows you to write actual CSS code to style your components. It also removes the mapping between components and styles, so using components as a low-level styling construct becomes very simple. This is nothing less than a milestone in the upcoming future of styling components.

4. Apollo GraphQL (with React)

Apollo is a A fully-featured, production-ready caching GraphQL client for every server or UI frameworkReact-Apollo is a convenient yet powerful way to bind GraphQL queries to your React components so that you can focus on developing your UI while data fetching and management get out of the way. At the same time, it has all of the hooks and extension points for you to be fully in control.